Sotto Voce
by butterflymind
Summary: A character study that turned into DS when I wasn’t looking


_Disclaimer: Stargate (II) Productions, ShowTime/Viacom, MGM/UA,  
Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions own the creative  
work Stargate Sg-1 and its characters. No copyright infringement intended._

_No money made the story is mine and I always put my toys away._

_Author's note: Ok this started out as a character study for a totally different story, then for some unknown (ok not THAT unknown) turned into a D/S. The Chopin piece referred to does exist, it's Mazurka op.68 no.4. It's also the last piece he ever wrote. I was playing it when this whole thing came to me, so it had to get in somewhere. There are a few midis of it out there but they barely do it justice. Oh and Sotto voce is the first performance instruction on the page and it means underlying (lit: under the voice)_

"Back in college, before I'd even heard of the Stargate or the Goa'uld or a thousand different worlds and was only vaguely familiar with the US military, I used to have a friend. Well actually I had several friends, but I remember this one particularly. She was studying for a doctorate like me but in a different field, Environmental science or something like that. I don't know, I never really paid much attention to what she was studying. To all of us then it was simply a constant in the background, everyone was studying for something, so what it was just wasn't that special any more. But I do remember she was a musician, that's what stands out in my memory. Partly because she was always so easy to find and to borrow money off. If she wasn't studying she was somewhere in the music department, by the old grand piano they had and she would always be involved in something outside her conversation with you, like she was only half concentrating. That's what made it so easy to leach money off her, she'd just pull it out of her pockets to make you go away, because she was always too polite to tell you to get lost. She was funny that way.

She played piano, her room was awash with scores and books, pieces by people I'd never heard of from love themes to jazz themes and back again. She was forever trying to explain it to me, the different styles and sounds and the way the notes fitted together. I guess that's something she, you and I have in common, the need to make other people understand what seems perfectly simple to us. If you think I don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of one of my lectures then you're wrong. All I have to do is listen to you or her try to explain these things to me with the same bright eyes, the same clarity of vision as I have and feel that same bottomless confusion that tells you it must be so simple. Yet won't let you grasp what you know is there somewhere. She used to supplement her income playing jazz in bars and cafés on and off campus Sometimes she said she used to slip some classics in as well, just to see if the patrons would notice. Most of the time they didn't. She called an anonymous performance, almost practise because although there was an audience most of the time the music was little more than background fodder, noticed only by it's absence when she changed scores. She said the conversation used to get a lot louder when she stopped playing, like the customers were trying to cover an unconsciousness gap in the ambient noise of the room. She didn't mind playing the jazz and actually quite enjoyed it when she got a chance to improvise, to play with the tune as much as she liked. But she always said it wasn't her first love and to anyone that really knew her that was more than apparent.

She liked singing to herself and playing show tunes when she thought no one else was looking. I can't remember how many times one of us must have walked into a room and only heard the sharp intake of breath, followed by her slicing the melody in half by snapping the book shut. But even that wasn't what she would most often play when left alone. Or simply left with a group of bored students who really didn't notice if she played or quaked. She knew thousands of classical tunes, from the famous to the famously obscure and even without a piano, her idle fingers would tap out patterns of notes without her even realising. It was often quite bizarre to watch, her right hand scribbling long hand notes for one of her course subjects whilst her left, quite unconsciously mimicked the chord patterns from Chopins preludes.

Do you know that just before he died, Chopin wrote a Mazurka? By the time it was finished he was too ill to even try it on the piano and never knew how it actually sounded except what he heard in his head. It was her favourite piece, she'd play it over and over working her way through difficult chromatic patterns, holding and sustaining a bridging section so incongruous that it seemed like it came from a different world. See how I talk about it, any other piece and I wouldn't be able to tell you which note was which, let alone how the mood sustained and changed throughout. But she told me about it so often it became second nature to me as well. It's so desperately sad, it's melody holds so beautifully then lurches up the keys, careening off up the keyboard until it slides back down, victory and defeat, life and death. She played it so often I can still close my eyes and see her hands racing over the keys. That always amazed me, how two hands could move so independently. She tried to explain how the music worked once. I'm a linguist for gods sake, you'd think I could master an alphabet that only had seven letters. I could just about manage one hand. But when she told me the same markings in different hands meant different things well that just threw me. For a simple code it's one of the hardest things I have ever seen. All musicians can do it tough and there's something so instinctive about it, the way you can see their hands move to the keys without their eyes ever leaving the page makes you sure this is a gift, not something they've learnt. But she assured me that it was. 'It's funny' she used to tell me when I swore she must have always had that ability. 'You spend years trying to perfect it, years swearing that it must be a gift, something you know you can never do no matter how hard you learn and try. Then one day you sit down and you can and from then on, it's as if you never couldn't.' I think that's one of the more important things anyone ever said to me."

Sam looked up at him, from her position nestled in his arms, firelight reflected in kaleidoscope patterns off his glasses, half obscuring the emotions in his eyes. She spoke without annoyance just curiosity at what was going on inside his head. His hands absentmindedly played with her, tucking the blond locks back behind her ears. She smiled and reached for them, encasing his hands in hers.

"Daniel, why are you telling me this?" He smiled at her and for a second the firelight darkened allowing her to see into his eyes.

"Because I heard that music today, whilst I was out. It reminded me, then I realised I finally understood what she meant."

"What she meant about what?" Sam asked confused.

"Waking up and finding you could." His arms tightened around her waist drawing her closer to him, his chin almost rested in her hair and she could feel his breath when he spoke. "For the longest time I swore I never could fall in love again, that whatever natural ability I'd had for it had died. " He smiled at her and she felt without even turning. "Then one day I woke up and found I could and it was as if I never couldn't." Sam smiled and turning she brushed her lips across his, then she fell back against his chest, her eyes heavy. Almost silently he hummed the opening phrase of Chopin's mazurka absently adding the trills through the first bars. Sam smiled he eyes practically closed. She knew that tune, knew how it ran from desperate melancholy to crazy euphoria and then through an emotion no one could quite categorise. The tune was death, from melancholy to euphoria to other-worldliness. But that could wait. For now all she wanted to do was sleep here, safely encircled in Daniel's arms. The man who'd jut told her he loved her, in a style that was so uniquely his own she could do nothing but love it as much as she loved the rest of who he was. Her eyes were so heavy, but still one question nagged at her.

"What happened to her?" She asked quietly, half muffled by Daniel's shirt.

"Huh?" he replied also growing drowsy in the warmth and security from the storm outside.

"Your friend, what happened to her?" Sam asked again, hiking herself slightly further up Daniel's from coming face to face with him as if proving she wanted her question answered.

"She finished her doctorate. Then she left." He smiled to himself slightly lost again in the memory. "Some of the other things that happened to her in college weren't quite as pleasant. So she just went. Got a job in Canada, left without a word and sent cards to us when she got there. It was the only way she thought she could go. I heard from a mutual friend about her just before I joined the Stargate project. She worked on stage there for a few years but she's married now, kid of her own and teaching Piano in Vancouver." He smiled to himself . "I think she finally gave up trying to prove there was anything else she wanted to do except music." He allowed Sam to slide down slightly, then wrapped himself around her, her head buried in his chest. "Just like there is nothing more I want to do no than go to sleep, curled up here with you." He felt Sam relax against him, her breathing evened out although the grip she kept on his shirt remained solid. He allowed himself to relax with her, his mind clouding over with sleep. "I'm glad my love," he whispered to her, his breath barely disturbing the fine strands of blond hair. "Everything changes around us I'm glad we're always here." He lay back a little further, allowing her to lie more fully on his chest. "Even if it can't always be in the limelight, still forever sotto voce."

End


End file.
